Tag: stress

Thoughts, update

Change your Thinking

Krista Walsh

These posts are often a challenge to come up with ideas for (*slaps wrist – for which to come up with ideas), but it turns out that training a puppy can offer some important life lessons that translate to the rest of our lives.

So, from my torn-up, bleeding hands and exhausted mind to you, here are some tips on dealing with difficult situations:

  1. Find things to laugh at. When you’ve got a 10lbs dog’s needle teeth sinking into your ankle, and the only way to reach a safe place to put a barrier between you is to drag your leg behind you, you have two options: yell, curse, kick — which achieves nothing, or laugh at the fact that you look ridiculous to anyone lucky enough to see you. The laughter removes the tension and slows the tears, making it easier to deal with the stress once you reach your safe place.
  2. Forget the word “no.” I don’t mean don’t create boundaries and instill discipline, because those are kind of essential for everyone’s safety and sanity and development, but the word “no” is quite unhelpful. It doesn’t provide any information. Correction with guidance is more likely to earn cooperation and avoid discouragement.
  3. Go for walks. A puppy waking up for a long nap is a nice excuse, but why wait for one? Grab your shoes and go out for a 5-minuter to wake up the brain and get those synapses firing.
  4. Find the fun. You COULD get stressed about the fact that you’re behind on all your work and you’re waking up at unreasonable hours, or you find the joy of the small victories, the quiet moments, the glimpses of pure happiness that come up even in the most stressful, frustrating times.

These are the lessons we’re working on for the next little while (hopefully with more of that small victories, quiet moments, and pure happinesses as the weeks go on), and hopefully there are some little tidbits of wisdom in here to help you through the rough patches, too!

Thoughts

Planning for Everything (Hint: You Can’t)

Krista Walsh

It doesn’t matter what you’re working on, you’re going to run into snags.

It might even feel, more often than you’d like, that you hit one snag after another.

That there are more snags than forward momentum.

You might start to feel beaten down by the snags. Exhausted. Drained.

You might even want to just throw in the towel. Walk away. Sell the house that came with more problems than you expected and go back to living with your parents because at least then if there’s a leak, they can handle it.

Okay, maybe I’m touching on a bit of a personal issue, but it did get me thinking about other things and the importance of looking at the momentum between the snags. What purpose the snags might serve or teach you.

They’re going to happen anyway, so I guess you might as well get something out of it.

In our case, it’s the house repairs. Back in December (FIVE MONTHS AGO), we discovered a leak in our basement. Since then, it’s been issue after issue with mice and drafts and construction, and now, three days after the wall was patched up and two days before the new carpet was due to be installed…. more water.

So we’re feeling a bit down, a bit of all those things mentioned above, but it happened. Raging at the world is not going to make it NOT have happened. So instead I’m doing my best (it’s not easy) to focus on the positive: at least we discovered the water before the carpet was installed. This new leak evidence has also helped us narrow down where the source of the water is likely coming from, which is different from where were thought it was before.

It’s still frustrating and exhausting, but at least turning it into a learning experience makes it productive. Something we can actively seek to interact with instead of passively cursing everything that brought us to this point.

As I’ve mentioned on this blog before: there is no good experience or bad experience — there is only an experience.

You can’t plan for everything that’s going to come up in the course of a project.

Conflicts with associates, corrupted/lost files (the horror!), personal issues that effect the quality of the someone’s work/deadlines…

There is no way to know in advance that your schedule is going to be uprooted — and if you’re lucky, it often won’t be — but if it does, there are really only two options: let the snag stop you, or learn from it readjust, and keep plodding along until the next one.

The former might be the easiest, but it’s unfilling, unsatisfying, and, really, you should probably get the job done, which leaves the latter.

Which is not easy to achieve.

My solution? Talking it out with people: first venting and then working through the issue rationally; self-care in the form of walks or meditation to clear the head and let the emotions settle so pragmatism and logic can kick in; chocolate.

In the end, we get there, it’s all about the journey as you go.

Because, really, the thought of living with my parents again (much as I love them) is one of the greatest motivators to keep my butt moving.

What are your go-to tricks to help you gain perspective on a snag? Let me know in the comments!